Although U.S. retail sales of herbal supplements reach into the billions each year, very little of these profits are from the sale of Chinese or East Asian herbs. This is due to the perception of quality—as such herbal medicine providers must show that their herbs are trustworthy.
To aid in this change, the NCCAOM Chinese Herbal Safe Compounding and Dispensing Taskforce has created a voluntary program, the Certificate of Qualification.
The course subject matter will be based on the FDA cGMP and the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA) herbal safety white paper, which was released last year. Features of this new program include the following:
The objective in creating this Certificate of Qualification program is to garner the public's support of the AOM professional, and to demonstrate accountability and responsibility for patient safety.
The NCCAOM provides additional details regarding this new program in our upcoming June issue.
Fertility acupuncture sometimes gets presented as a narrow protocol: a handful of reproductive points applied uniformly across patients. What this case reinforced for me: The most powerful work happens when we read the whole picture. The hormone data, the constitutional tendency, the sleep, the digestion, and the menstrual pattern, so we can treat the environment the ovaries live inside.
For those of you unfamiliar with alpha-gal syndrome, it’s been in the news recently for causing Americans to be allergic to meat. It is an acquired allergy to galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or alpha-gal, a carbohydrate found in mammalian meat and many mammal-derived products. A new case series on auricular acupuncture is so intriguing points toward a viable treatment strategy rather than lifelong dietary restriction alone.
The motivation behind our practice of medicine is important, impacting not just our experience but also the experiences of those we treat. It is perhaps for this reason that the aspiration to help not just some, but all beings heal, has historically been an important part of the medical tradition. To explain this, we need to consider how medicine is interwoven with other social domains.